"I have asked him to come and to examine me properly—an hour at the least—and to bring anybody he thinks fit." Nicholas Ware was not looking at her. "And I have told him in the letter exactly what he said to me eight years ago, and exactly how long ago he said it, because I have worked out that if I do not put it in writing, then we shall both be extremely polite about it and nothing will be found out."
"That was well done."
"It was not well done. It took me nine weeks." He put his own knife down. "Hannah, I want to say one thing before he comes, and I am going to say it badly. If he tells me the same thing, I shall want to be alone for about a day, and I shall not be able to explain why, and I want your leave now to do that, rather than have it be a thing that happens. And if he tells me something else, I do not know what I shall do at all. And that is what I have actually been frightened of for nine weeks, and I have only just found the words for it."
Ambrose Pell was seventy, and came in the second week of February, and he was in that house four hours.
The nine weeks before he came were the strangest of that marriage, and Hannah said afterward that they had been a great deal harder than the four hours themselves, because nothing changed and everything was different. They had dinner in the estate room every night. They talked about the North Road, and the dairy roof, and Mrs. Trant's list. And about four times a week, Nicholas said something that was very nearly a joke, and neither of them mentioned Ambrose Pell at all. And Hannah watched a man of six-and-thirty be perfectly ordinary for nine weeks while he decided whether to find out how long he had, and she got up every morning and did the household books and said nothing.
She very nearly broke twice.
The first was in December, at about the fourth week, when he said at dinner quite lightly in the middle of something else, "I have been thinking about the long gallery," and Hannah put her knife down too fast, and he saw her do it, and neither of them said one word.
The second was in the January, and it was worse. There was a night in the chair—the fourth that month, and it was a long one—and she sat on that floor from about one until four. And when it had passed, and he could speak, and she had got up to put the window down, he said to her back, "If I write to Pell and he says the same thing, I shall have made you sit on that floor for the rest of it, knowing exactly when."
Hannah Sedge stood at that window with her hand on the sash. "That is not a reason," she said.